Hail the speed of technological advancement; for barely a week has past since we reviewed our first 12x DVD writer and here we have in our lab the latest and indisputably fastest 16x DVD writer, the long wait for this write speed is finally over. We had stated in our 12x review the short window these drives have upon their release and that its primary role was to serve as a follow-up to 8x writers that would eventually lead up to a write speed of where we are at now, 16x.

The first sign of this acceleration towards 16x was at a time when manufacturers started rolling out DVD writers based on the lowly 4x write speed and we are all aware of the rate of advancement from there on out. It's only a matter of time before engineers managed to bring the once snail's pace DVD authoring process down to a familiar timeframe of less than 10 minutes. We all know that 8x writers took care of that but the incursion of 16x writers would only serve to better this timing and we should finally be looking at a write time of less than seven minutes. For those users who are still relying heavily on CD writers and have been sneering and using the slow write time of DVD writers all this while as an excuse to make the conversion, the arrival of 16x writers couldn't have come at a better time.

Besides having a furiously fast 16x write speed in its veins, our review unit from BenQ, the DW1600, has support for the latest DVD+R DL format as well. With these two elements, users of this drive will have the best in authoring time and storage capacity when 16x DVD+R and DVD+R DL discs become widely available. It's to be noted that this model is just a single-format drive; meaning to say the DW1600 is purely a '+' advocate and will only be able to write to DVD+R/RW media, something to bear in mind if you're an early adopter.